One Night (12 page)

Mr Marse insisted I take two week’s leave.

‘You’ve been through a terrible
time,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘I really think you need to rest.’ He
coughed with embarrassment, his double chin trembling. Then he said, ‘I don’t
want you to become a centre of gossip in the office.’

His concern came too late. From the
moment I’d appeared, the place had buzzed like a swarm of bees disturbed by an
unexploded stick of dynamite. Abieda, head of the credit department, had
already asked, ‘Did you really kill a man?’

‘Not with my bare hands.’

Her black eyes narrowed as though
this was an aspect she hadn’t considered. ‘They say you shot him with his own
gun.’

‘Well, let’s say it came in handy.’

She guffawed, hand over her mouth.
The black roll of hair pinned to the back of her head shifted. ‘What was that
like?’

And there was the horrible reality.
They didn’t care so much that I had been to hell and back and survived. Key
focus was on the fact I had killed someone. I was a celebrity not a survivor and
questions poured around me like flotsam from an open sewer.

By the third day I was glad to take
Mr Marse’s offer and disappear.

Dealing with my mother wasn’t so
easy. From the moment I’d left hospital, she had insisted I stay with her for a
few days – and in all honesty I was glad to be cosseted, fussed over and waited
upon. A kind of inertia overcame me for days and just sitting quietly with
Sticky in a patch of sun or in front of the television were my highest
aspirations. But I had gotten better and gone home, and this second round of enforced
rest was frustrating. My mother managed to spend an inordinate amount of time in
my flat.

‘The doctor said you must rest.’

‘I am resting.’

‘You’re sitting up.’

‘Yes, but I’m still resting.’

‘You should lie down.’

‘Then I can’t see the telly.’

‘You shouldn’t be watching that,
it’s stressful.’

‘Mum! Stop it! Okay, just stop!’

Tears came to her eyes. ‘I’m sorry,
Casey. I’m so sorry.’

I knew she meant Mona.

‘Yes, Mum, I know. It’s okay. I’ll
be all right. It will just take time.’

My mother was silent for a moment,
fiddling with the bow on her blouse. She’d had her hair done and I saw that her
nails were painted. The tiny bit of fame, whatever its source, had had its
effect.

‘That picture of you in the paper,’
she murmured.

‘Which one?’

‘The one of you and Sticky. Everyone
likes that one. They’re all talking about it.’

‘Oh, grief,
that
one! I look
so awful. Like a zombie after a long night of the undead.’

‘Yes, but they all love the dog.’

At the end of the week Shannon and Todd came round for supper. I did a salad,
Shannon brought a lasagna, Todd the wine. Sticky had been bathed and combed for
the event and was looking mournful. It was my first normal engagement with
friends – a ‘coming out’ party. I liked Todd Pennington. He was tall, reminding
me of Stephen but with dark hair and deep-set, slinky dark eyes. He had a slow,
deceptively lazy way of moving as though he never planned to do anything much
in a hurry in life. He had spent five years in the army but had left to become
a computer nerd. He had a mind quicker than anyone’s I’d met. Shannon might
have chosen acting as a career but there wasn’t a cube or Sudoku puzzle she
couldn’t solve in seconds – so they were well-matched. Shannon was small like
me. The biggest thing about her was her hair: a fall of rich, pale blonde that
gave her the
fairy princess
look. I’d wanted hair like that since I was
five.

We discussed my ‘in the woods’
story at length, with Shannon interjecting several times ‘I never liked that
Sedgeworth’ and Todd murmuring from time to time ‘Things don’t really add up.’
On the third such comment I slowed and looked at him.

‘What? What doesn’t add up?’

‘This guy, Jake. I mean, what was
he
really
doing up there? What was he planning? Was he just going to
reprimand Brent for the whole drugs set up? Was he going to beat him up?’

‘I think that was the plan. I think
he was wanting revenge.’

Todd frowned. ‘Not something you’d
want to attempt on your own. Not with this Sedgeworth character. He should’ve
taken a buddy.’

‘I don’t think he’s got a buddy.’ I
added quickly, ‘Well, probably not someone who would like the idea of beating up
a man in front of his girlfriend.’ I didn’t want to give the impression that
Jake was a loser. ‘Besides, maybe he just wanted some answers from Brent.’

‘But then where was Brent supposed
to be when Mona was killed? Said he came back looking for Mona. I think that’s
a story.’

‘Maybe he’d left something behind,
something incriminating.’

‘Yeah, and maybe that something was
you. Just as well those other guys turned up.’

This sat unpleasantly with me –
because it was probably true. I thought of Brent sneaking into the cottage
while I was outside in the shed weeping over Mona’s body. Even now, the thought
lent a rill of fear. In the weeks after the murder, my imagination had become
extremely agile as I wrestled night after night with everything that had
happened. Nightmare had a habit of creeping out of the dark as I raked my
memory with just these kinds of questions.

‘I think it all had something to do
with why Brent wanted to be away that particular night. Maybe he was running
away from something. Something shady. And Mona latched on to that something and
asked too many awkward questions.’

‘She must have confronted him,’
Shannon breathed.

There was a little silence. This
was the guesswork scenario I played out nightly in my head like a video
recorder stuck on replay.

Todd said, ‘Your lip is bleeding.’

I jumped up. ‘Damn! It’s this one
cut that won’t heal.’

‘You’re lucky if that’s all you’re
left with.’

‘I know,’ I agreed, gently pressing
with a tissue, glad the rest of the bruising was covered by clothes.

Todd said, ‘Why are you so
determined to pin this on Brent? It sounds like the perfect scenario for the
loony tunes Bunting chap.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed unhappily. ‘It
does. But would he have been clever enough to hide the body in the shed?’

Todd shrugged. ‘We can’t know how
clever or not the man was. These loopy types are sly and nifty-footed in their
own way.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ I admitted
reluctantly. ‘It just seems to have Brent’s fingerprints all over it.’

‘Strangled with barbed wire,’ Todd said,
staring at the carpet as if he’d just spotted something nasty in the weave. ‘Sheesh!’

‘Don’t keep saying that,’ Shannon
said irritably. ‘Can’t you see you’re upsetting Casey?’

Todd gave me a look. ‘Sorry, girl.’

‘Do you want some more wine?’

Shannon stretched like a cat. ‘I
think coffee’s more the order.’ She got up. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix.’ She went into
the kitchen.

Todd sat leaning forwards, elbows
on knees, pressing his hands together, fidgeting. He shot me a quick look from his
narrow eyes. The silence became uncomfortable.

At last, I asked, ‘What?’

He eased back, obviously glad I had
offered him an opening. ‘The gun,’ he said. ‘The one that you shot this Wally
Bunting with.’

‘Yes?’

‘That’s quite some weapon. How did
you manage that?’

Again this morbid fascination with
the killing. Fleetingly I thought of the movies we liked to watch: the guns,
the violence, the unnatural death of human beings splashed across screens. It
made me sick. We were hardly any different to the Romans and their bloodshed
arenas.

Patiently, I said: ‘It was an
accident.’

‘But you pulled the trigger?’

‘Yes, I did – but I couldn’t see
where I was aiming. I just shot the damn thing.’

‘And got him right between the
eyes.’

I wasn’t sure if there was
admiration or censure in his tone. Maybe a touch of envy. It seemed he had
glimpsed a different world in me – one where the rules could be broken and
dangerous games played. I caught a gleam of interest in his expression beyond
the question about the gun. It was annoying. I decided to see how much of this
blood-thirsty drama he really liked.

‘No, not between his eyes. I wasn’t
that accurate. The bullet went in under his chin and out the top of his head.
It blew the light bulb to smithereens. But it didn’t matter. Wally couldn’t see
anyway. There wasn’t much left of his head.’

Behind me, Shannon gave a little
scream and almost dropped the tray of coffee she was carrying.

‘Shit, Todd! Can’t you just leave
this stuff alone! You keep harping on it. Poor Casey is trying to get back to a
normal life. You’re not helping!’

Todd shrugged but offered no
apology. His look was that of fascinated horror – as though a lizard had just
planted itself in the middle of the carpet; he was repulsed but he wanted to
touch it. In describing the vivid details of Wally’s death, I had made things
worse.

I was thankful when, after coffee, Shannon
said rather quickly, ‘We must go.’

We said goodbye at the door. Todd
held my hand for too long. ‘If you need anything, anything at all, don’t
hesitate to give me a call.’

Shannon glanced at him. Todd had
said ‘me’ not ‘us’. The word suddenly seemed unnecessarily loud.

‘Thanks.’

I closed the door. I’d been glad of
their company but now I just wanted to be alone.

Alone. That was what nobody understood. They thought I needed company all the
time. That I would be frightened if left alone. It was hard to stop it in the
beginning, everybody was so kind. My mother was continually in my flat. She
made arrangements for me to meet her in the city for lunch. The girls from the
marketing department at work set up a coffee morning. Old school friends who
had known Mona phoned constantly, insisting on seeing me. Even my old
headmaster asked me to come to tea to discuss what had happened to ‘one of our
brightest stars.’

All I really wanted was time to
think. The night in Witch’s Wood had been a fast-track jumble of action and
event. I needed to understand how and why things had happened the way they did
– but whichever way I set the pictures, one irrefutable fact kept coming up: I
simply didn’t have all the puzzle pieces. I had not been privy to what had
taken place the day before that terrible night, and so along with everybody
else, I was left to speculate – and speculation was of no value to the police. As
Detective Inspector Cartwright took pains to explain to me.

Cartwright looked surprisingly young despite the wings of grey at his temples.
Dark-haired with incisive eyes, he had the appearance of a man who had suppressed
emotion while engaged in a lifetime of scrutinizing others. He carried himself
with military bearing and was very gentlemanly, if a little patronizing. This
trail of destruction and death was nothing particularly new to him and, with
patience and erudition borne of long experience, he would winkle out the truth.
Not that there was any implication I was lying, rather that his expertise was
infinitely superior and something I should consider before effecting any kind
of subterfuge.

‘I’ve already told the police what
happened,’ I said. ‘A thousand times.’

His face was impassive. Pale blue
eyes under heavy lids were hardly sympathetic. It was a statement he’d heard
too many times.

‘Yes, well, exactly what happened
is sometimes coloured by emotion. So if you don’t mind, I’d just like to
correlate all information so we’re
both
sure of what happened.’ His eyes
settled on me. There would be no argument.

‘All right,’ I said, feeling
outclassed.

‘What do you do know of Brent
Sedgeworth?’

‘He told me he was an antiques
dealer. Bought lots from deceased estates. That sort of thing.’

‘And where did he sell it?’

‘He had a shop in Lincoln and one
in Leeds. That’s all I know. I never knew where they were.’

‘And he and your friend, Mona, went
up to the cottage often?’

‘Yes. Well, he was there mostly.
Mona went up at weekends.’

‘You don’t like Mr Sedgeworth from
what I’ve gathered.’

‘No.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘He just didn’t seem straight to
me. You know,
honest.
I always had the impression that he had something
up his sleeve.’

The vestige of a smile lit the
deadpan eyes. ‘Yes, that type of character I understand well.’

He looked at me. There was a patch
of sunlight creeping towards the couch where he sat, dust motes spiraling
hazily in the air. He moved his foot and the shiny toe of his shoe was
spotlighted.

‘Did he ever threaten you? I mean,
apart from what happened on the night in question?’

I hesitated. Could the looks Brent
had given me, laced with a conflict of lust and dislike, be considered
threatening? ‘No,’ I said. ‘There was nothing like that. We just didn’t like
each other, that’s all.’

‘And any violence between him and
Mona?’

Again I hesitated. I knew she
wasn’t really happy – but she would never have admitted that anything was
wrong. Mona was too reserved. And too keen to make the unlikely relationship
work. Stoic and slightly reproving, Mona was the type who stuck things out.

Eventually I said: ‘Not that I know
of.’

He eased back on the couch. ‘So you
were asked to go and look after the dog because they would be away for one
night. You said Mona sounded upset on the phone?’

‘Yes, well, I thought she was upset
about the dog but in retrospect maybe that wasn’t why she was upset.’

‘You think they’d had an argument?’

‘Could be. Perhaps she knew
something about Brent and didn’t want to say anything on the phone.’

Cartwright sat forward. ‘I’m trying
to get a sense of what happened on that day. I need to get an idea of how
events played out in such a way that it ended with murder.’